Pico Della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man1

● The first past of the Oration attempts a general justification of the study of
philosophy. Pico begins with a praise of man. But he rejects as unsatisfactory
the traditional views that man owes his distinction to his place in the centre of
things or to his character as a microcosm. The true distinction of man
consists rather in the fact that he has no fixed properties but has the power
to share in the properties of all other beings, according to his own free
choice.
● Yet since man has this power of choosing what form and value his life shall
acquire, it is his lot and duty to make the best possible choice and to elevate
himself to the life of the angels. In this ascent toward the highest form of life
he is assisted by philosophy and its various parts.
● The second part of the Oration explains Pico’s interest in philosophy and the
plan of his disputation.
● Two ideas that are emphasized in the Oration: dignity of man and the unity
of truth.
● The idea of the dignity of man has a long and rather complex history. The
praise of man as the inventor of the arts and crafts, as a microcosm, as a being
distinguished by speech and reason, is a common theme of ancient thought
and literature.
● The notion that man is closer to God than any other earthly creature appears
in Genesis and pervades all the Old Testament. Early Christian emphasis on
the salvation of mankind and on the incarnation of Christ also implied a
special position of man in the world, and some of the Church Fathers
developed this notion and fused it with the conceptions inherited from pagan
antiquity.
● All these ideas were repeated with new emphasis during the Renaissance.
● Giannozzo Manetti composed a treatise On the Excellency and Dignity of
Man as a counterpart to Innocent III’s work On the Misery of Man.
● Ficino, in his Theologica Platonica, gave an additional philosophical
importance to the conception by stressing man’s universality and his central
position in the universe.
● Pico who was undoubtedly familiar with most of these previous statements,
introduced, however, an important new element. He emphasized not so much
man’s universality as his liberty. Man is the only creature whose life is
determined not by nature but by his own free choice; and thus man no longer
occupies a fixed though distinguished place in the hierarchy of being but
exists outside this hierarchy as a kind of separate world.

1 Excerpt from The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, Introduction to Pico. Pp. 215-222
Please take note of the above point(italicized). While this characterizes Pico’s own
position with respect to Humanism, which in itself is an attempt to understand
the world from the perspective of Man, also places him on the side of freewill in
the debate between predestination and freewill. This discussion over fate was at
the same time a theological and a philosophical issue, heavily debated during
Renaissance. The other text by Calvin we have as one of the readings, should be
placed in this context. One can see how Pico engages with the question in the
Oration, where he argues in favour or freewill, while Calvin as we shall see, will
argue and elucidate with much gusto, in favour of predestination.

Also, it is to this humanist thought, the discipline humanities owes its derivation.
Even the very conception of the human as we understand today is a Renaissance
concept:

● “The early Italian Humanists were primarily concerned not with

philosophical speculation but rather with the development of a cultural and
educational ideal that was based on the study and imitation of classical
antiquity. Yet when they were driven to justify that ideal and the significance
of their classical studies they claimed that these studies contribute to the
formation of a desirable human being and are hence of particular importance
to man as man. This argument is reflected in such expressions as studia
Humanitatis, and the “Humanities”, and the “Humanists”. The emphasis on
man is one of the few ideas, perhaps the only philosophical idea, contained in
the program of the early Humanists.”
● Thus the Oration is not merely a piece of rhetoric; it contains ideas that are of
major importance in the thought of Pico and in the thought of the
Renaissance.

Not so important point (for your purposes, that is) about Pico: “His interest in
Cabala (Jewish Mysticism) led to a broad current of Christian Cabalism
which include, among other, John Reuchlin, and which remained important
throughout 16th century”.
It would be to this aspect of Pico, more specifically to the Christian Cabala
that one finds Erasmus strongly oppose. I’m mentioning it here, just so you
get a sense of how the different thinkers that we’re dealing with are also in
conversation with each other, directly or indirectly, since they are
commenting on or interpreting similar subject matters that were pertinent to
the time, which we now understand as Renaissance.
We will be looking at Erasmus next week, the excerpt from Praise of Folly.